Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Art Show Winner

This is a painting I completed for a local art contest. The theme was "The Power of the Creative Mind." As a science lover, aka dork, when I was planning this painting I decided to go with a scientific approach of power. As in:

Power = Work x Height/Time

How does the brain create work? My brain is constantly churning out new ideas. So many painting, writing, and random ideas that I could never keep up.

So, how to show the concept of "mind"? My first thought was to have a person's head with the top kind of lifted up as strands of imagination flowed out.

But that was too Hannibal for me. I still get nightmares from that movie. So I decided to go a less disgusting way.

See the gears? They are in the three primary colors: Red, yellow, and blue. From these three basic colors, all other colors are possible. (Except white which is of course the absence of color. The white strands represent wisps, hints of ideas that sometimes turn into something concrete, but often blow away like smoke.)

I won first place with this painting receiving $300 in prize money and my painting on promotional posters around town. It was my first win!

This is another painting I submitted for the same contest (not knowing that we were only allowed to enter one). This represents the left brain/right brain theory of neurobiology. The left brain is associated with complex numbers, patterns, math, language, rules, etc. The right brain is responsible for colors, imagination, and abstract thought.

The theory is that everyone thinks with one side of the brain more dominantly than the other. There are quizzes you can take online to tell you from what side of the brain you think. I am a dork. I took two quizzes and I scored the same thing:

I am 63% left brained. I think more logically, focusing on math, language, and all things dork. I would agree with this. Even while painting I am very rigid and structured. It's hard for me to do abstracts. This is about as abstract as I can get, and I squirmed the hole time while painting this.